Studio A
Urban Design Studio A
Leire Asensio-Villoria
Studio Description
While the suburbs have become a familiar and prevalent model of urbanization, the drive to offer an alternative to the congestion and density of the city has historically been a valuable area of exploration for the design disciplines. The common motivations underpinning the projects of the counter movement to the 19th century metropolis could be seen to have been an impulse to offer a model for living environments that would enable lifestyles more closely related to the open spaces and gardens that had been absent within the metropolis.
Today, notable experiments in suburban living persist. However, with a growing awareness of the limitations in extending the suburbs as a sustainable model for urbanization and the massive burdens it can impose on our infrastructure, social lives and health, much of this activity has centered around a wider professional and disciplinary mandate to address the tension between the enduring desire for “a house with a garden” against pressures for higher densities.
This tension is an imminent concern for Melbourne, where its legacy of extensive suburbanization runs counter to challenges posed by the projections for steady population growth as well as a transforming demographic. While higher density development and strategies of suburban renovation offers intelligent means for addressing these concerns forecasted for the city, inertia and entrenched cultural values invested in suburban ways of living can conflict with these larger planning ambitions.
Studio Outcomes
In this studio, you will be tasked with investigating how Melbourne’s proposed metropolitan centers of growth in its suburban extensions may densify intelligently. You will consider how these new centers may also enable this densification while also addressing a model for urbanization that is sensitive to concerns surrounding crucial aspects of sustainable development as well as enabling the cultivation of civic and ecologically enriched urban spaces or environments.
The studio will engage with these sites in order to offer tangible design proposals that adopt a projective attitude towards addressing the opportunities offered by this apparent contradiction between an objective need for more compact forms of urban development with a persistent desire to conserve (or reclaim) the treasured qualities offered by suburban living.
Studio Leader
Leire Asensio Villoria, Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Design.
Previous to the MSD, Leire was a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Cornell University’s department of architecture and the Architectural Association in London.
While at the GSD, Leire was also design research lead for the Health and Places Initiative, a research focused on studying the links between the built environment and health outcomes.
Together with David Mah, Leire is author of a number of books and her writings have been published in a number of academic as well as professional books and journals. Leire is also active in the production of architectural and creative works as asensio-mah whose works has been published and exhibited internationally.
Leire is a registered architect in Spain and received her Diploma in Architecture awarded with honours from the Architectural Association in 2001.
Schedule Mondays 09:00-12:00, Thursdays 09:00-12:00